Why we live in an anti-tech age
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I'd like to think that there has indeed been a major shift, if not revolutionary then teetering on the border, that has to do with the handling of information. Over the years, humans have been better and better at two things regarding information: *) Persisting it *) Proliferating it I think that we have reached the penultimate step in that evolution, where we no longer need to physically carry all information stored in our brains or in books in our backpacks, but can utilize the channeling of information from WWW to a small client device that fits in our pocket. All that is left there is lowering the threshold between that client and ourselves, which I believe will happen with the mainstream adoption of wearable tech. The point to all this, though, is not the technology per se, but rather the shift in our relationship with the information we handle. There are certain limitations put on information purely for the purposes of storing and finding it. These limitations have gone from mnemonic encapsulation (for easy remembering), to sequential ordering (for easy expression in writing), to multi-media information containers that can be essentially tailored to the information and its use, rather than the other way around. Also, the ease of accessing the information required for any situation means that the correlation between the amount of information and the effort to bring it along has all but evaporated; we have less and less need to put in the physical effort to memorize and/or carry the information with us. This all means that the required amount of "cache" in a normal human being is much less than it used to be. And in a society as reliant on competence as ours, this means that the ability to store and access vast amounts of information no longer is the societal marker of excellence that it once was. Quite the contrary, anyone making the effort to memorize information that is readily available through a smart phone will likely be seen as curious, if not stupid. We have, in essence, gone from a society where the power lay in the ability to keep information, to a society where the power lies in the ability to acquire it when needed here and now. To put it another way: It's just silly to memorize stuff when you have Google.